Extending Ximian Evolution to support blogging

I’ve been thinking about this sometime and figured I’d throw the idea out and see who else is on the same wavelength.

Problem: Email and blogging (reading) is a significant part of my profession life. I’m a software developer by trade, specifically in the
areas of Java/J2EE mixed with biotech, and reading various blogs helps me keep up to date. Now, in Linux, afaik I’m forced to help two seperate application
s running. In my case, Evolution for email and Straw for blog reading. In my perfect world, these two applications would be integrated ala the NewsGator pl
ugin for Outlook (never used it, but it looks like what I had in mind). To take things a step further, I’ve been reading on Robert Scoble’s blog about his
experiences with OutlookMT. As I understand it, it’s an Outlook-integrated plugin that allows him to directly drag-and-drop items that should be posted on
his blog. I think that’s pretty slick but given my rather low volume of posts, something I don’t need yet.

Possible Solution: Integrate one of the existing RSS-readers with Evolution. I personally use Straw (python-based) which is imho an excell
ent reader. It’d be nice to see it integrated with Evolution, perhaps adding a ‘News’ folder and shortcut that takes you to your list of feeds. Just someth
ing nice and simple that saves me from having multiple applications performing seperate but conceptually similar tasks (I don’t consider it a stretch to th
ink about an RSS-feed as if it were a mailing list.).

This is more a post to see what kind of interest there is out there for such integration. I really don’t know the feasibility nor do I really have enough f
ree time to make a serious attempt at it. However, I’d be willing to contribute if people are interested in putting forth a collaborative effort.

Anyways, it’s a feature I’d like to one day see implemented and would help the open-source community keep pace with some of the recent windows-only advance
ments i’ve been reading about.